


in silver silence

by orphan_account



Category: Stiletto (2008)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-08
Updated: 2014-03-08
Packaged: 2018-01-15 01:22:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1285927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stasya fights her way to the surface on a Tuesday. (Post-movie fic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	in silver silence

**Author's Note:**

> Written only thanks to large amounts of wonderful inspiration from the lovely [Jolie](http://tmblr.co/m9sTsZWkUkT66bqjVBr6TQA). Dedicated also to [Clare](http://tmblr.co/mWtQRHedhxPtPpYLECAFxyg), my darlin'. ♥ 

Stasya fights her way to the surface on a Tuesday.

An ordinary, miserable Tuesday on all accounts, the sky hung heavy with clouds, spattering the sidewalks and the people scurrying about, jackets or umbrellas over their heads.

Raina is not one of these people. It’s not that she minds the weather, no — she simply has nowhere to go. It is all listlessness, the way she lives these days. Tucked up in the small apartment with the worn rug and the broken wall phone by day, people-watching for hours from the wooden window-seat. Half-listening to the radio and sharpening knives she’ll not use again. She fought the dragon, and won, and all that’s left are ashes to rise from. 

If only she knew how.

By night, she walks. To say that this city is not the best of places after dark does not do the corruption justice, but Raina is not afraid. All cities are truest at nightfall, when those hurrying inside can be seen passing those who thrive in the darkness.

The only thing she misses are the stars.

And Stasya. And the stars, again. On clear nights in Russia, her mother would sometimes take her by the hand at sunset and lead her out in front of their small flat, pointing out the heavenly bodies as they came into view. Here, they’re obscured by light pollution so thick, it could be cut with a knife. It feels a little bit like hiding, and a lot like suffocating. _  
_

Tonight, she pulls the door shut behind her to the sound of a phone’s ring, close by in the flat’s little closet of a bedroom. She doesn’t pick up on the first call, or the second. It’s only after three completed calls, halfway through the fourth, that a mixture of curiosity and irritation drives her to take up the phone. She doesn’t say a word, but the caller must sense the breathing because there’s a delicate,

_ “Miss Mavias?” _

(She should have picked up at the very first ring.)

What she hears on the other end of the line is like having the breath punched out of her. It staggers her, momentarily, before sending her running. In five minutes, she’s put a good four blocks between herself and the apartment — phone abandoned on the rickety kitchen table.

\--

Raina bursts through the thick double-doors of the hospital without care for the front desk, and someone calls out after her something she doesn't hear. The path to room 108 is as well-known as the avenues of her own home.

Desperate in the dimness, she rakes the room over, until her eyes light upon the the pale girl who rests, barely upright, against the headboard of her bed. For once, moon-colored hair spreads in a messy tangle about the pillow she's cushioned against, and Raina thinks it's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.

In from the hallway only the barest slip of lamplight breaks, but it does lend some merciful color to Stasya's cheeks.

Raina pushes through the veritable cloud of doctors and nurses, crawls up onto the bed against their protests -- gently, though, as gently as she can -- and presses her fingers to the hollow where her sister's heart beats. Just to be sure, just to be sure.

Indifferent to the hovering hospital staff, she buries her face in Stasya's neck, and cries.

_"Golubushka,"_ she says, through a closing throat, and feels Stasya swallow, hard.  _Little dove._ Because of her hair — in childhood, so blond, it was white in the sunlight.

Her sister must feel the wetness on her skin, because she lifts a small and shaking hand to rest against the edge of her cheek, and they do not stir for a very long time.

\--

Even so, they are not out of the woods quite yet. Stasya is kept under strict observation for several weeks, and in this time the small apartment gathers dust and silence in newfound abandonment. 

The first time, the staff attempts enforcement of visiting hours, but Raina bares her teeth, and they do not gamble that her bark is worse than her bite.

She sleeps in the hard plastic chair beside the bed, hand slung across her sister's arm -- and it is the best sleep she has had in two years.

\--

A few days after Stasya comes home, a brown paper package arrives in the mail. Bulky, with thick envelope paper and defined rectangular contents. It was unnecessary for Virgil to sign it for her to know that he is the sender, and she does not open it. Stasya helps her tape it to the inside of an empty cabinet and then they move to a better part of town. She has more than enough money to live well — she just never had a reason to.

The new apartment is, in a word, beautiful. Two-bedroom, all clean, bright beige walls and a pond view fem the kitchen window. In the spring, there are ducks.

Slowly, the sunlight starts to come back into her life. The first week, she sleeps with her sister tucked up in her arms, although there are two beds and neither is built to hold two, even if said two are more slender than most.  Desperately afraid that she has taken part in an elaborately painted dream, Raina doesn’t let go of Stasya for a solid week.

By some small miracle stacked upon all of the other, larger miracles that make up her current existence, Stasya retains the ability to speak. She suffers sometimes debilitating migraines and the very occasional seizure, not to mention having to relearn fine motor skills and undergo the process of rebuilding her weak and atrophied muscles, but she can _speak._

Raina doesn’t sing зелёная карета. She’ll never sing that song again — it leaves a bad taste in her mouth, now. After so many nights in a darkened room, overpoweringly antiseptic, it has lost its beauty. Against the gentle soundtrack of Stasya’s uneven breathing — first, only in her arms, but eventually, across the room, maybe rereading a favorite book or relearning, clumsily, stubbornly, how to use the coffeemaker, it sounds now like a funeral hymn. And no one is dead.

So, she finds new songs to sing, when Stasya asks. A new one, every time. English and Russian, pop and folk. (She stays away from the lullabies.)

It takes her a very long time to relax enough to sleep when her sister sleeps. The first night is terrifying, and Raina finds new ways to accidentally rouse her sister from sleep every hour or so. Just to make sure she will. Just to make sure she can.

In time, though, the cold dread of nighttime begins to subside. Stasya’s sleeping and waking becomes a constant, and eventually the sight of her sister’s sleeping form, the mechanical breathing, does not burn her chest with fear.

Nancy has her baby in early April, just as soon as the last touches of winter have melted into green-grass shoots in the damp earth. A girl, tiny and perfect, whom she names Hope. On the bus ride home Raina holds Stasya in her arms and whispers about the day she came home from the hospital the first time, red-faced and tiny in the same way.

She is thawing. A new day, every time. She is thawing.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! As always, commentary and constructive criticism are very much appreciated, if you can spare the time. ♥


End file.
